This invention relates generally to the field of selective call control centers for transmission of calls to selective call receivers, such as paging receivers and more particularly to determining the order of transmission of calls to the receivers and/or determining which address within a receiver is to be called.
As the use of pagers becomes more and more established, the stage is already being reached where the control center of a paging system is becoming saturated at busy times, in the sense that more paging calls are being placed than the system is capable of transmitting to the destination paging receivers on the allocated radio frequency channels. To overcome this problem, control centers of paging systems administer a queue of calls for transmission, by storing each call in memory, and transmitting the calls, often on a first-in, first-out basis.
"Priority" is a concept used in paging control centers, or terminals, to alter the processing of selected calls, primarily in regard to their insertion into an output queue. Specifically, calls assigned a priority higher than that of other calls waiting for output are given advanced placement in the output queue, so that they will be transmitted sooner than calls assigned lower priority.